Building an investment app in 48 hours — #OpenBankHack18
tl;dr Won 3rd place at a hackathon with Liber, a product for people to make automatic investments. In 48h we coded a fully working app with real UK bank accounts, deposit & withdrawal, face biometrics, and live Bitcoin price updates.
As President of HackaSoton (hackathon-focused tech & entrepreneurship student society at University of Southampton), I decided that this academic year we should not only organise our own hackathon, but also plan 2 trips to other hackathons in England and mainland Europe.
So we asked, people voted, posts were shared on Facebook, train tickets bought, and that’s how we all ended up at #OpenBankHack18, an open-banking themed hackathon organised by Railsbank in London.
Prior to the event, we had access to a list of ideas suggested by the organisers and sponsors. I didn’t have any open-banking related ideas myself, so I perused their list over and over again. It was hard to pick, none of them stood out to me.
Friday evening, I was on a train from Southampton Central to London Waterloo. My girlfriend, Nicky, was with me. I was wondering if we’ll meet anyone else from Southampton there—after all, I advertised this trip a lot through HackaSoton. Was no one else joining us?
We arrived in central London around 6pm. After a brisk walk through festively decorated streets, we found the Dreadnought Building of University of Greenwich, where the hackathon was taking place.
We checked in and grabbed some swag—t-shirts, rubber ducks, and plenty of stickers. Then we attended the opening presentation where we learned about the venue, what Railsbank does, who are the sponsors, and what APIs we had at our disposal. It was followed by team-matching, where we discussed ideas and formed teams.
Eventually, I settled on one of the challenges suggested by the organisers:
I want to create a mini “neo bank” like Monzo and auto-save a portion of my balance each month into an investment fund (and I want to chose the funds) — I want to be able to see the investment returns in an investment ledger.
After speaking to a few people interested in the same challenge, we formed a team of 8 and started brainstorming. The team name was Neon, from “neo bank”—short and easy to remember. We all were from a diverse background and had some experience with investments. After a few hours, tons of ideas, voting rounds and scribbled papers, it was still unclear which direction we were going.
We decided to sleep the night and continue the next day. Except that… I couldn’t sleep! I kept thinking about the idea, how it should work, what we can bring new to the fintech scene…
The next morning the team gathered to finalise the idea and start developing; that’s when I realised that we were not aligned. I had something different in mind, and was confident it was a better idea. So I decided that Nicky and I should split and form a new team. Even though we were only 2, I knew we could work it out. And that’s how Liber (pronounced with é) was born.
In ancient Roman mythology, Liber Pater was a god associated with fertility and freedom. Our idea, inspired from the initial challenge, was to create a product that helps people make long-term investments. We sketched how we wanted the mobile app to work and look like, and decided to implement the following features:
- quick registration with a phone number
- secure login with face recognition
- give each user a real UK bank account
- users can deposit / withdraw money from their account
- customisable fund allocation so users decide what to invest their money in
- ability to view the performance of the portfolio
- live Bitcoin prices
Thanks to Railsbank, we knew we’d be able to give users a real UK bank account, and thanks to Aimbrain, face recognition was as easy as integrating their SDK. The only thing missing was the actual investment execution—trading money for the asset. Still, we wanted to show some portfolio fluctuations at the demo, that’s why we had live Bitcoin prices on the list.
The unique selling point was that we give investors the flexibility of making their own investment choices, while still keeping Liber as simple as using a robo-advisor. In other words, a mix between Freetrade and Nutmeg.
Register, get a bank account, choose what to invest in (e.g. 50% Bitcoin, 40% Facebook stock, 10% Gold), deposit money, done. That’s Liber.
By midday, I had a mock iOS app ready, showcasing all the screens in our app. Nicky was busy too, working on our website to show off the product features.
Fast-forward a few hours, and SMS-based authentication was working! We gradually added all the features. The best part was when we switched to the live Railsbank environment and got a bank account capable of storing real ££. I sent £2 from my Monzo account and in less than a minute, it appeared in my Liber account! Withdrawal was just as quick.
Weirdly, that night I started losing my voice, up to the point where all I could do was whisper. I was annoyed and worried for the demo. And Nicky couldn’t miss the opportunity to make fun of me… what can I say, I can’t wait to return the favour! Fortunately, my voice recovered in time for the demo.
We worked late into the night until around 5am when Nicky crashed to sleep. Two hours later I joined her, sleeping only 2–3 hours that night.
It was Sunday morning and we still had a few bugs to fix and a redesigned allocation UI flow to implement. The one I had designed was cumbersome… I didn’t like it, but I didn’t know how to make it better. After explaining the problem to Nicky, she came up with a much better idea. Genius!
We managed to implement everything in time for the demo, where we had only 4 minutes to present our work. Sadly, we only managed to show how the interface works. We did show live deposits by again sending money from my Monzo account, but I wish we had timed it better so we could also talk about all the reasons we built Liber, the selling points, our business model, our mission, our website. We had focused so much on the implementation and features that we didn’t prepare enough for the final presentation.
After an agonising hour waiting for the judges to make the final decisions, we learned we won the 3rd place! Winners or not, I was super proud we managed to build a functional investment solution in just a weekend. I was also super tired… I only slept for 5 hours in 2 nights.
It was a great experience, meeting my expectations and giving me what I wanted from a hackathon: sleepless nights, hacking atmosphere, cool challenges, interesting APIs, food, snacks, and hackers falling asleep on their chair.
I wasn’t sure if anyone had joined us from HackaSoton, but on Sunday I found out there was an entire team formed by students from Southampton. HackaSoton goal accomplished!
Speaking about the team from Southampton, Clive (co-founder of Railsbank) said he was impressed by their grit and how they managed to present a product idea despite them being just first year. He bet that if they come again next year, they’ll surely get on the podium!
Clearly, HackaSoton has to do this again next year.
